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Cat Mother Open-Sources Game Engine
Mr.Oreo writes "According to Flipcode, Finnish videogame development company Cat Mother Ltd. has now closed its offices, but in their last meeting the company board decided to publish all company source code as open source. A large part of the game assets are also available. Published material includes a fully playable prototype of a 3rd person action/adventure game, and a commercial quality in-house 3D-engine (C++/DirectX9). The source code is published under the BSD license, and the content is published under the GPL license. Just downloaded the engine and snooped through it - it looks pretty complete, and definitely worth having a look at if you're a 3D code monkey."
that really make me renew my faith in open-source. This is what it's truly good for in the private sector. I get annoyed every time I hear some kid say that Half-Life should be open-sourced just because the sequel is coming out and it's based on Quake II which is open-source anyways. This is what Open-Source should be though ... the company is defunct and the technology would go to waste otherwise ... why not give it away under the BSD liscense so you can still get the kudos. Hell, maybe the original developers will get to finish their dream in their spare time!!
Sure we wang, can.
Whoooo!! Flood of hilarious games. Now all that's needed is some open source coders with lots of physics knowledge and lots of time on their hands -> TEH ULTRA-YAY! Think that stair/truck dismount shit! I guess there might be more constructive purposes for a 3d engine, but as a gamer I can't think of any myself =/
I would like to see what benefits accrue to this company in mods and improvements over the next year. This is interesting stuff. I hope they release their in-house documentation too.
to see that the time they spent won't be in vain, and that their efforts will live on.
:P
Thanks, Cat Mother.
The question I have to ask, and maybe I am being skeptical, is 'what happens next?' I see that they've shut down the company web page, and there's downloadable code available on a sourceforge page. I don't see any links on the sourceforge page for anybody involved in an ongoing project. Does that sort of thing 'grow' out of the code eventually? How?
A Good Intro to NetBS
i remember when certain games that i was looking forward to would get cancelled, if more companies released the source, at least there would still be a chance for it to be a finished product.
for example, EA's Motor City was a great game, now its closed the doors on the server, why can't they release the source code under the GNU and allow people to setup their own servers, or to re-program on offline mode. now my $60 product is useless and my Faith in EA is damaged. just because they can't use the soucre anymore, doesn't mean nobody else could.
I applaud Cat Mother's innovative ideals, the world would be a better place if more companies saw Open source the same way.
/. is overrun by bed-wetting elitist nerds
let it be known, for anything other than servers, a *nix OS sucks
- Get seed funding from Venture Capitalists
- Become a registered Xbox developer
- go bust!
So now their trying the slashdot principle:"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Hopefully this gets ported to OpenGL... DirectX is useless for non-Windows platforms.
They've gone bust, and gone opensource. Since this, their site and product has probably received more interest than it ever has. This is an excellent business move... Expect these guys to produce The Next Big Thing(tm).
For releasing under the BSD license and not GNU.
"I know how to program games, A to jump, and after I get the flower, B for fireballs... dumdi dumdi dum"
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Its interesting to note, this is not the first time a game company has decided to give the world their unfinished product.
Crack.com opened up 'Golgotha', along with 'Abuse', back in 1998. Everything about this, including the source is located here.
I'm not a big gamer, so I don't know what Cat Mother ever released. Googling doesn't return much, but someone tell they've actually had at least 1 game finished. Otherwise, it doesn't say much that they're releasing code. How does one know it's "production quality" if nothing ever went to production?
I'm also glad that the company is behind this move, as oppose to the Sierra/Falcon 4.0 kerfuffle.
One of the three zip packages, the one containing the images and 3dS models, is causing me problems. It unzips fine, but when I try to click on any of the file icons to open them, I get an Explorer error and that Explorer window shuts down. Has anyone else experienced this?